As a person who has an immigrant spouse (who entered the United States legally and has always been here legally), I have insights into the US Immigration System and what the Democrat and Republican position on the issue is.
Take the 2018 midterm. The Democrats ran on stopping Trump, on impeaching Trump, then the House Democrats didn’t even sue the administration for swiping money from other programs to build the “border wall”, even though this clearly goes against Constitutional separation of powers and the Constitution giving the House of Representatives primary control over taxation and spending issues, and then Nancy Pelosi gave him money earmarked to upgrade the border fencing near her own district in San Francisco.
Then in 2020 Joe Biden got in, defended Title 42, and then enacted a new program that’s almost exactly like it when it got struck down by a court.
So it’s clear what this really is. The Democrats are all for illegal immigration when they think that the illegal immigrants will end up in Florida and Texas, not California.
And this is crazy strategy because once you get to the next census and it counts illegal immigrants living in Florida and Texas, they gain clout in the federal government, and California loses it.
George Carlin called it “NIMBY”. So the Democrats want us to take in illegal immigrants, but “Not in my back yard!”
Part of the reason I voted for Biden anyway, was that he’s a “Yesterday’s Republican”.
Much like Reagan’s amnesty program or the bipartisan Immigration and Nationality Act, Joe Biden mainly restored the status quo for legal immigration (such as my spouse’s case) while Trump’s position on the issue was more like the episode of Parks & Recreation where Ron Swanson said “Some of this will be easy like ‘Take down all the traffic lights.’ and ‘Dismantle the Post Office’. The rest could take more time, like ‘Bring this all crumbling to the ground.'”
That was basically Trump’s methodology for destroying everything about America whether it was worth keeping or not. “Bring this all crumbling to the ground.”
Richard M. Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation, had a number of terms for Donald Trump, including “The Wrecker” (my favorite), “The Infant”, and others.
(I usually went further and said “Cheeto Hitler” or the “Creeping Orange Menace”.)
As a Libertarian (mostly, I suppose), I find Biden and Trump both to be the wrong thing for this country at the wrong time. The United States needs an enema for sure, and the federal government in particular.
But the whole country is falling apart under this system. Both Trump and Biden are responsible for the hyperinflationary mess and the debt crisis and the ruined economy.
Trump gave trillions of dollars in “tax cuts” to the wealthiest and the corporations at the worst possible time, and then Biden and the Democrats followed up by not taking any action to correct that while also implementing deficit tripling new spending and entitlement programs and getting us bogged down in a quagmire where every time Ukraine blows up a 1950s tank that Putin vomited out on their land, they’ve won the war again, same as every day, except that this has all happened before and will happen again.
The Democrats, and most of the Republicans like these wars. The situation in Ukraine is a 2020s rehash of 1980s Afghanistan which was made into the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”. (A movie everyone should see.)
It will most likely end the same way. If they ever do oust the Russians, their country will be in ruins and Congress will lose their appetite for spending money and Ukraine will devolve into a third world country.
At the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Congressman Wilson was trying to get bills through to rebuild Afghanistan. It was a modern and beautiful country and a democracy at one point, but Congress “beat the Russians” and that’s all they thought matters.
When you get involved in something, it means you own it. What happened in Afghanistan next was what was obviously going to happen.
The United States was giddily “poking the bear” to harass the Soviets and didn’t seem at all concerned that it was setting up the “War on Terror”, which is a ridiculous concept on its face, unwinnable by definition, and the major victims have been Americans who now need “national ID cards and passports” to conduct business with government agencies, and who face nebulous and unconstitutional domestic spying programs.
I recall in the 6th grade (I think) watching “Channel 1” (a classroom news thing for students that kept them well informed with accurate reporting on world events…the government has no interest in keeping Americans informed now, of any age…they call it “deceptive” and “fake news” and “disinformation” when you get good, solid, information that they used to provide every school child).
They had a segment on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their barbarism against women and death squads, etc. They ended up blowing up World Culture that can never be truly replaced, including the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I don’t like Biden, but the threat of Theocracy comparable to the Taliban coming to America is what the Republican Party has turned into.
We have a Theocracy already in one branch of the federal government (the US Supreme Court). We have “Catholic Sharia Law” controlling women’s ovaries, and with time, it’ll get worse.
Since there is no election for the Supreme Court, we have to pray that they’ll eventually keel over from something and a Trump or a DeSantis won’t be in office to name their successor.
So while I liked a lot of what George Carlin had to say, I can’t say I agree with him on voting. You vote, it’ll be bad, but if you want 9-0 “Catholic Sharia Law”, just put another Republican in office and you’ll get to live under it in short order.
If one can measure these things, Catholicism (especially the conservative wing) is one of the greatest tragedies to unfold on America. It’s a cancer.
They are child molesters, who stole much of my mom’s pension after she worked for them for over 25 years, and now they command people who are not Catholics that if they have an abortion, they will be found and sent to prison.
They don’t even hide how corrupt and and what a garbage “church” they are.
Back in the day, when people were (rightly) more skeptical of the Catholics, they wrote in safeguards against things like indoctrination of children using state education dollars, that are being torn down by this unhinged Trumpian Supreme Court.
Catholic Schools only exist for two reasons. Brainwashing/Indoctrination, and to give their pedophile pervert priests a constant supply of young boys to rape.
The irony, of course, is that an industrial strength serial-bankrupt adulterer that my parents voted for is the one that gave them control of our highest court.
Living in America under today’s media reminds me strongly of Captain Picard being tortured and repeatedly asked “How many lights do you see? and being electrocuted and beaten every time he refuses to be broken.
And of course my parents are eating shit and grinning about it and gladly saying “I see five lights, of course, thank you, may we have some more bullshit please?”.
Their goal is to make everyone insane.
(Picard told his Cardassian torturer he saw four lights, which is the correct amount of lights, all throughout the process. In the end, I think he confided in Riker that he had been exposed to so much abuse that he really did start to see five lights, but he still said “four” because he wasn’t about to give his torturers the satisfaction of having broken him.)
I view American politicians and their “news” as the Cardassians of Star Trek. Evil, menacing, gaslighting fucks. They’ll plunder and rape an entire population while telling it they are their benevolent protectors.
The United States went from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery.
The way it works is “You’re free, but the invisible whip (not to be confused with Wonder Woman’s) is that if you don’t work, you don’t have food, medical care, or shelter, and you will run out of money quickly. Then they steal your retirement from you. But you’re free and the government is your benevolent protector. Oh, and don’t get any funny ideas about saving money because we’ll raise government spending and inflate it all away.”
My spouse comes home every day, pissed off. Walmart is cutting hours again (to the just and the unjust alike, because fuck morale) to do a “quiet layoff”, boss yells at you for doing what their handheld computer told you to, then the next day you get called in and told thanks for never being late for work in three years.
Then I get to deal with him in that mood until he settles into bed and does what we all do these days. Try to imagine a world that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.
By not having children, my gift to the world is less contention for jobs, food, oil, resources in general, and healthcare and education to the next generation. They have enough of a mess on their plate already. More than anyone deserves.
The wealthy elite that Lord over us run this system and try to make this an argument about race and generational blame and stuff.
I mean, Bill Gates alone hoards $150 billion dollars and pays next to nothing in tax. “I gave all my money away and it doubled because that’s how philanthropy works.” while everyone else is fucked.
The system has stolen, the Republicans and the Catholic church, has stolen my retired mother down to the point where she didn’t have a hundred bucks to have the muffler welded back onto the 2003 Impala that I had fixed up and then gave back to her.
She backed over a curb the other day and was dragging it around and the mechanic felt sorry for her and said she could come back and pay him on Wednesday.
She let a series of increasingly domineering and abusive (her second one physically) men in her life that drained the bank account and mostly took up space (the only one she was married to that pulled his goddamn weight financially, and never cheated on her or beat her was my father, but he was a tyrant in his own ways), so it does stand to reason that she would vote for them too.
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